C.B. infrastructure crumbling fast

Council forced to put a crunch on capital projects; leaders seek help from province

Workers pave a highway in Nova Scotia. (JEFF HARPER)

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SYDNEY — Water wages a cruel campaign on asphalt.

Mindless, but conniving, it begins by breaking down the tar that binds our precarious transportation links together. Then it slithers down through cracks, waits for winter, freezes and expands.

With the asphalt breached, the water pours in, carrying away the gravel base.

“Eventually, there’s nothing you can do but redo the road,” Wayne MacDonald, director of engineering and public works for Cape Breton Regional Municipality, said Thursday.

“With proper maintenance, you can expand the life of your investment. … But right now, we go to a street and do three or four of the worst pot holes and then move on.”

As he sits in his fourth-floor office, which overlooks Sydney Harbour, MacDonald’s back may be to the crumbling infrastructure of the former steel town, but his mind is on the water constantly seeping into his pavement and the pipes slowly weakening underground.

But MacDonald’s $40-million budget doesn’t include a dime for new road construction.

The municipality is faced with a crippling conundrum: private industry creates the jobs it needs, but private industry needs opportunity, reasonable taxes and services.

With opportunity in short supply and an 18.5 per cent unemployment rate, Cape Breton regional council, in its recent $140-million budget, decided not to borrow more money and to hold the line on taxes.

Something had to give — it was infrastructure renewal.

“But how can private enterprise be expected to invest in a municipality that can’t guarantee service delivery,” Mayor Cecil Clarke said in a separate interview.

Clarke’s last-ditch plan to ward off the collapse of infrastructure in the province’s second largest municipality, is a $300-million infrastructure capital campaign.

It’s meant to serve two purposes, stabilize the infrastructure decay and create an estimated 360 jobs for the life of the five-year plan.

But the municipality doesn’t have $300 million.

Instead, it’s paying $16 million annually to service its existing $93-million debt.

So it’s looking to the cash-strapped provincial and federal governments. The plan would see the municipality and province paying $75 million each, with the federal government covering the remaining $150 million.

Clarke, a former provincial Tory cabinet minister and campaign organizer for the Harper government, has a Rolodex of political connections that stretches all the way to Ottawa. But he has to stop in Halifax first, before he can carry his hat in hand to the feds.

Last week, Clarke sent Municipal Affairs Minister John MacDonell a long list of shovel-ready road projects that cost $100 million. The request is part of the $300-million infrastructure project.

“The request is much larger than funding has historically allowed,” MacDonell said, referring to the infrastructure program.

On Wednesday, Clarke will take his entire council to Province House to hold a Cape Breton Regional Municipality day. Councillors will hold a briefing breakfast for MLAs and meet with provincial cabinet ministers before they observe a session of the legislature.

Whether they’re in Halifax or Ottawa, Clarke’s council has to convince a public that has grown wary of pumping money into Cape Breton since the closure of Sydney Steel and the Devco mine in 2001.

Beyond money for economic development, there was the $400-million tar pond cleanup and, most recently, $38 million of federal and provincial money spent to dredge Sydney Harbour, which has yet to lure a container terminal.

For his part, MacDonell is trying to satisfy the demands of municipalities that are struggling with their own infrastructure deficits while the premier attempts to keep the provincial budget balanced.

“The department will continue to work with Cape Breton Regional Municipality and other municipalities, to access and maximize federal funding and address municipal infrastructure needs,” the minister said.

Besides waiting for more details on Sydney area’s infrastructure plan, MacDonell is also waiting on the federal government to provide more information on the Build Canada Fund, a program that assists municipal infrastructure projects that was renewed in the recent budget.

Traditionally, the cost of infrastructure projects were evenly split between the three levels of government, but, under its policies, the fund does allow the federal government to cover half the tab on occasion.

With the tar ponds cleanup finished and the Devco site remediation winding down, Clarke’s municipality needs jobs and infrastructure.

When he goes to Halifax next week, the mayor said he’ll be pitching it as a need for the whole province, not a want for Cape Breton.

“It’s not a matter of us becoming a failed state. We’re not sustainable now,” said Clarke. “There’s no value in looking back and blaming someone else. The numbers are what they are and we have to accept them.

“The cost will be greater to the taxpayers of Halifax to support us as a welfare state than to help us become economic contributors.”